Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Murderbot is not OK but the reason why is [redacted]

System Collapse by Martha Wells

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CBR16 Bingo: Rage (The Murderbot Diaries are all the rage all over the bookish internet, in addition, there’s a lot of rage-inducing behaviour from the evil corporation in the book) Spoiler warning! This is book 7 in the series, and absolutely not the place to start reading. This book will not make as much sense if it’s your first encounter with Murderbot. You should have read at least All Systems Red, Artificial Condition and the previous novel, Network Effect to have the requisite backstory for […]

“A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women”

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger by Soraya Chemaly

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This is a DNF book for me, and you should know that going into the review. I did not DNF because the writing was poor, it was in fact very good. I did not DNF because the information was not well-sourced or in some other way in deficit – everything laid out was well placed and well investigated. The book describes the ubiquitous experience that women have with being taught to tamp down their anger and presents the research on the racial and cultural differences […]

Best Western

Sing Her Down by Ivy Pochoda

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Read as part of CBR16Bingo: rage. The rage of women, ex-cons, survivors is centered in this book. The opening chapter contains a monologue on female rage. You ever have an author that you think you should like more? You just try and try with them but they can’t put it together for you? That was Ivy Pochoda until These Women, which I read a couple months ago and will absolutely be in my Best of 2024, with a great shot to place in the top 5. […]

Serviceable mystery requiring some suspension of disbelief

Rage by Jonathan Kellerman

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Years ago I read a Faye Kellerman novel and hated it, which colored my expectations for this one (the two are married and both Faye and Jonathan write detective fiction). Despite my misgivings, this one was sitting on my shelf when I was looking for a Los Angeles setting, so into my reading rotation it went! (We had a fall trip to LA planned and I like to match my reading to the destination to build anticipation). Verdict: this was a serviceable mystery that had […]

Year of Penny? EXCUSE ME, LIFE of Penny!

The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson

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5/26 UPDATE: if you are curious and want to check out an excerpt, you can do so HERE! Do you miss Happy Endings? If you have seen the show, then the answer is obviously YES SO MUCH OH MY GOODNESS PLEASE COME BACK! If you have not seen the show, then what are you doing? Get out of here and inject all three seasons directly into your eyeballs before returning! Several days ago, the unfortunately canceled Happy Endings turned 10. 10! It seems like just yesterday, Alex […]

Pearl Clutching

Rage by Bob Woodward

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Apparently, it took Bob Woodward 3.5 years and close to a thousand pages to deduce that Donald Trump is unfit to be President. Good job, Bob. Here’s a cookie. Like Fear, his other work on the Trump Administration, this is less a book with a narrative thread and more a collection of scattered anecdotes from various sources cobbled together the way someone cuts and pastes articles from a newspaper for a scrapbook. In reviewing a bad movie once, Jamelle Bouie said that the film was “the […]



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